Header 1

Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Recently
a new 10-year, $100 million dollar initiative was announced: a
project called Breakthrough Listen. The project will use two of the
world's largest radio telescopes in an attempt to look for radio
signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. It's a new jolt of
cash to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and has
largely been funded by a Russian billionaire named Yuri Milner.

We
can be sure that this money will be spent in very conventional ways.
Virtually all of it will go for listening to radio signals using big radio
telescopes like the one shown below.

Our
scientists seem to be fixated on big machines. It is as if they are thinking: the way to make a big discovery is to use a big, big
machine. But I can imagine some
ways in which you could conduct a search for extraterrestrial life
without using big machines. Some of these ways would involve searches
very different from looking for radio signals from distant planets.

One
method would be to investigate all the evidence suggesting that we
may be visited regularly by one or more extraterrestrial
civilizations. Currently the analysis of UFO sightings is done only
by poorly funded organizations and private individuals. Just think of
what might be found if, say, 1 percent of that 100 million dollars was
devoted to investigating this topic. We might find very good evidence
of extraterrestrial life, which is the very thing SETI is supposed to
be looking for.

Another
method would be to look at the human genome for evidence of the
non-natural. We might find some evidence that someone tinkered with
human DNA, and such tinkering might have been done by
extraterrestrial visitors that came here and modified our DNA. Or we
might actually find some message left behind by extraterrestrials who
came here long ago and modified our DNA to leave some message inside
it. This is a fascinating idea that was charmingly presented in an
episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next
Generation. DNA contains
nucleotide “letters” that could be used to spell out any
imaginable message. Such a message could be included in the
“noncoding” part of DNA that has no known purpose.

Another
way in which we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence
without using big machines is to investigate crop circles. These
mysterious things have so far only been investigated by poorly funded
private researchers. But what might we learn if a million dollars or
two were spent investigating these anomalies? We might get some proof
that these mysterious things are of extraterrestrial origin.

Another
way in which we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence
without using big machines is to systematically investigate photos
taken in our solar system of Mars and other bodies, looking
specifically for traces that may have been left behind by
extraterrestrial visitors. Currently the only people who do this are
poorly funded individuals, but with even minimal funding some very
interesting photos have been found. We can only wonder what might
turn up if a million dollars or two was devoted to such an
investigation.

Still
another way we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to
investigate fully the photographic anomaly of orbs. These strange
anomalies are showing up repeatedly in photos, often as objects that
look too big to be dust, too bright to be dust, too fast to be dust,
and too colorful to be dust. These anomalies cannot be generally
explained as dust particles, because (as explained here) the blockage fraction of dust
particles in ordinary air are too small (a particle of dust in typical outdoor air
blocks only about 1/15000 of the area right in front of a camera).
Could it be that orbs represent some strange extraterrestrial life
form that has come to our planet? We might find out by spending
perhaps a thousandth of the 100 million dollars recently allocated to
SETI.

Still
another way we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to
try making use of clairvoyance or ESP. If extraterrestrial
civilizations are millions of years more advanced than ours, the
minds in such civilizations may have psychic abilities that dwarf any
that a human being has. There may therefore be some chance of
leveraging such a possibility. We can imagine a program that could
search for humans with relatively strong ESP or clairvoyance, and
then use them in an attempt to receive telepathic messages from
extraterrestrials (or at least some indication of which corner of the sky they live). Such an impression might be received if there are
extraterrestrial superminds out there with something like super-telepathy. Such an
approach could be carried out at relatively tiny expense, so it might
be worth trying, even if it is highly unlikely to succeed.

These
are all interesting and inexpensive alternative ways in which we
could search for extraterrestrial intelligence without spending much
money, and without using big machines. But I think it unlikely that
any of them will be undertaken by the new SETI initiative. Instead,
almost certainly that initiative will follow the conventional
mainstream wisdom regarding the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence: the principle that when looking for aliens, we must put
all of our eggs in one basket.

Part
of the reason is a kind of “big iron” fixation that dominates the
minds of scientists. The thinking is kind of like this: the bigger
the machine you use, the better your chance of success. So scientists
build incredibly expensive machines that often produce modest
results, when the same funding (used to fund a hundred little
projects) would probably produce much greater results.

But
the main reason why SETI has been so narrowly focused may be perhaps
that scientists want to find something consistent with their
worldview, but don't want to find things inconsistent with their
worldview. So they don't want to follow approaches that may lead them
to what they are looking for, but also may lead them to other things
they don't want to believe in. By getting involved in edgy SETI
approaches, scientists might find the extraterrestrial civilizations
they are looking for. But they might get evidence for things they don't
want to believe in, and have declared taboo: things such as psychic
phenomena, undiscovered spiritual realities, or some design in the
origin of humanity.

So
SETI is burdened by a kind of methodological timidity. The typical
SETI researcher's attitude is like this:

People
who think there might be evidence we are now being visited by aliens
are a bunch of kooks and crackpots. It's all too obvious that if
aliens were here now, they would have a giant spaceship that everyone
would see in the sky. Ignore anything strange happening in our skies
when looking for evidence of extraterrestrials. The only sensible way
to look for aliens is to keep trying to listen for radio signals (the
same way we've been trying for 50 years without success).

The
wisdom of this attitude is by no means obvious. One problem is its
fallacy of assuming that we can presume to infer what it would be like
if extraterrestrials had arrived on our planet. Since
extraterrestrials might have arisen many millions or billions of
years ago, we have no idea whether they would still be using anything
we could recognize as technology. For all we know, they could have
evolved long ago into beings of pure energy that are now floating
around in our skies. The other problem with this attitude is the
insistence that the only viable search option should be to keep trying a
technique that has not proven successful after 50 years.

Imagine
you had a very sick little daughter, and you knew that if you found out
more about some medical treatment, you might save her. You would
leave no stone unturned in your search for that knowledge. That is
the approach that a good SETI program should take: damn the taboos,
and leave no stone unturned in searching for extraterrestrials. But
instead SETI programs seem to limit themselves to turning only one
type of stone (the “radio signal” type of stone). While it still may make sense to use the lion's share of SETI funding on radio searches, a decent fraction of the budget (perhaps 10%) might be better spent on alternative SETI approaches.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

The
history of science contains many cases of theories that were oversold
by eager apostles. One of the main cases today involves the
overselling of the theory of natural selection. In this case many of our biologists are representing as “settled science” the
idea that natural selection is the main cause for evolution. The
evidence for evolution is good, but the evidence is quite weak that
natural selection is the main cause of evolution in large organisms.

Let
me clarify the difference between evolution and natural selection.
Evolution is the idea that over very long periods of time, species
very gradually undergo changes, developing novel adaptions to their
environment, with such adaptions sometimes becoming sufficient for
one species to evolve into a different species. Natural selection is
a hypothesis about the cause of evolution. Natural selection says
that evolution occurs mainly because organisms that are more fit to
survive tend to reproduce more. Darwin introduced both the basic
idea of evolution and the theory of natural selection at the same
time, in a book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection. But it is quite possible to believe in
evolution without believing that natural selection is its main cause.

The
modern theory of natural selection is all centered around the idea of
random mutations. The idea is that the blueprint of a species (found
in its DNA) undergoes random changes called mutations, which might be
produced by something like a cosmic ray hitting the DNA stored in a
cell, or a random “copying error” when the DNA is not copied
exactly right. In some cases, it is claimed, these random changes
result in a change that is actually beneficial. When such a thing
happens, it is claimed, natural selection causes the organisms that
had such mutations to reproduce more often than some other organisms
in that species which did not have such a mutation. It is claimed
that this causes the mutation to be inherited more and more often in
later organisms belonging to that species. Such a process, it is
claimed, it so powerful that it can account for all kinds of
astonishing adaptions in organisms.

Now
the question is: what evidence is there for this theory that natural
selection is the main force behind evolution? Although there is lots
of historical evidence for evolution (found in the fossil record),
there is no significant historical or fossil evidence that natural
selection has been the main cause of evolution in large organisms. Think
for a moment of the difficulties of ever getting such evidence. In
almost all cases when we have a fossil record of some organism that
existed eons ago, we don't have DNA from that organism. Even if we
had that DNA (from a few dead organisms), it would still not be
enough to figure out the history of DNA changes in a species from long ago, and whether or not natural selection was the cause of evolution in a
particular species.

It
turns out that getting evidence for natural selection requires an
incredibly hard procedure. This procedure has been attempted on some
small organisms with very short lifespans (such as bacteria and fruit
flies). The procedure might go something like this:

You
start out with a population of organisms of some type, and you
carefully record the DNA of all of those organisms.

You
track the evolution of these organism over many generations, while
applying some factor that causes lots of mutations. The DNA of these
organisms must be checked at very many times.

You
attempt to determine whether useful new adaptions are being evolved,
and attempt to determine whether such adaptions (this new
functionality of evolutionary novelty) are being produced by natural
selection and random mutations.

The
experiments that have been done along these lines have produced very
modest results. The study here studied 600 generations of fruit
flies, finding no change more dramatic than a 20% shorter life cycle.

Another
experiment is Richard Lenski's long-term experiment on bacteria,
which has tracked more than 60,000 generations of bacteria. The
results of this experiment have been modest, with the main result merely being that the
bacteria seem to have developed an ability to digest citrate that it
did not have before. Documenting such an adaption is “peanuts” compared
to demonstrating that a significant and complicated structural
innovation (such as the human eyeball or a wing) did occur because of natural selection (something that no
one has ever demonstrated).

Even
Lenski's meager result is subject to doubt, as a large fraction of
scientific experiments are not replicated when another experimenter
tries to replicate them (and in the case of Lenski's experiments, it
will be decades before we can determine whether someone is able to
replicate his results).

There
is a simple reason why experiments of such a type can never show that
natural selection is the main cause of evolution in large organisms.
The shorter the life cycle of an organism, the more likely it might
be for it to evolve beneficial changes because of natural selection.
Bacteria such as those in Lenski's experiment have a lifespan about
130,000 times shorter than a human lifespan, and can double their
population in only about an hour. It is all too possible that
natural selection is sufficient to cause useful adaptions in very
short-lived organisms such as bacteria, but is not sufficient to
cause useful adaptions in large, long-lived organisms such as
animals as large as a dog or larger.

But
isn't there some way, in theory, that you could prove natural
selection by using large long-lived animals such as mammals? Yes, in
theory there is. But it has never been done, and would be a nightmare
to do, as it would take ages.

Imagine
how the project might be executed. After building some special
testing environment (perhaps some special large building), you would
start out with a population of some large species with a lifespan of
more than decade. You would take samples of the DNA of each organism
in such a population. You would then monitor such a population over
many generations, frequently taking DNA samples to see how the DNA
was changing. Since a generation for such organisms would take at
least a year, the project would have to probably last for thousands
of years. All in all, it would be a project more difficult than
landing men on Mars. No one has ever done such a project, or even
one tenth of such a project.

It
would seem that for reasons such as these, the theory that natural
selection is the main explanation for the evolution of large animals
is one that simply is not very susceptible to experimental
verification. But what about some other approach? What about some
approach in which we get the predictions of the natural selection
theory, and then try to verify that such predictions are coming true?

But
that doesn't work either. The reason is that the modern theory of
natural selection is all centered upon the idea of blind chance. The
theory assures us that natural selection will do random stuff we
can't predict. So there is not much of a way to match up reality with
the predictions of natural selection. For example, natural selection
does not give us any predictions about what a particular organism
will evolve to in the future. So there is no way to exactly match up
predictions and reality when trying to get proof for natural
selection.

So
from the standpoint of being verified, the theory that natural
selection is the main driver of evolution in large animals is on
incomparably weaker ground than other scientific theories which do
make a host of exact numerical predictions that are repeatedly
verified to the letter. Using a theory such as the theory of
gravitation, one can make very precise predictions such as the
prediction that a particular object released from a particular height
will hit the ground 14.5 seconds after it has been dropped. Such
predictions have been verified countless times. But the theory of
natural selection has no such record of predictive success. Some of
the things that are sometimes claimed as “successful predictions”
of the theory (such as the discovery of something like DNA) are not
actually predictions uniquely predicted by the theory. A nonbeliever
in natural selection would have been just as likely to have predicted
that something like DNA existed before it was discovered.

Eager
to try to prove that natural selection is an important determinant of
human traits (or the main determinant), some scientists have resorted
to statistical analysis of DNA (the genome). But such studies may not
be mathematically sound. In 2009 Phys.org published this article
stating the following:

Scientists
at Penn State and the National Institute of Genetics in Japan have
demonstrated that several statistical methods commonly used by
biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to
produce incorrect results. "Our finding means that hundreds of
published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect
conclusions," said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor
of Biology and the team's leader.

Likewise
the paper here states, “Many of
the statistical methods for detecting natural selection are
unreliable.”

The studyGenome-Wide
Scans for Footprints of Natural Selection
notes, “a puzzlement arises when we inspect how modest is the
replication for discovery of different genomic regions between
algorithmic approaches or between different studies.”

Given
these items, one must wonder whether scientists scanning the genome,
eagerly looking for faint traces of natural selection, are much
different from UFO enthusiasts scanning photos of Mars and
occasionally claiming to have found something important. Given a
mountain of data, sufficient time and a huge toolkit of statistical
methods to choose from, it is not too unlikely that you may be able
to find “faint traces” of exactly whatever it is that you were
hoping to find. I may also note that finding some statistical trace
of natural selection would not by itself prove that natural selection
is the main thing driving evolution in larger organisms such as man.
It is entirely possible that natural selection is a relatively minor
effect in species with long lifetimes, and the main thing propelling
evolution is something else.

There
are also very substantial reasons for doubting that natural selection
is the main thing that caused evolution in humans. The best reason I
know of is the inability of natural selection to explain dozens of
human mental faculties and traits that do not seem to be adaptions that contribute to reproductive success. Consider
this question: what is it intellectually that makes a human different
from a monkey? There are many things: we have good language ability;
we're good at math; we have morality; we are spiritual; we have esthetic abilities that allow us to create and appreciate art; we
have inner lives and introspection; we can form abstract ideas and
ponder philosophical questions; and so forth. But none of these
things are biological adaptions that improve an organism's likelihood
of surviving until reproduction. So none of these things can be
explained by natural selection. It would seem, in fact, that natural
selection theory predicts that such things as these should not even
exist.

Human traits hard to explain by assuming natural selection

So
far from just being a case of natural selection not making
predictions that we can verify, the problem seems to be that natural
selection theory would seem to make counterfactual predictions about
human nature – that you should not have any important
characteristics unless they make you more likely to survive until
reproduction (in other words, that you should not have most of the
things that make you different from a monkey).

The
difficulty of using natural selection to explain the origin of man's
mental capabilities is compounded by the fact that about 200,000
years ago the population of humanity was believed to be small, as few
as 10,000. The fewer organisms there are in a population, the more
unlikely that there will be enough mutations for natural selection to
produce something useful.

I
may point out here that you could not counter these arguments merely
by pointing out some evidence that natural selection occurs. Let's
consider three different ideas that can be listed in a table.

Hypothesis 1

Natural
selection occurs.

Hypothesis 2

Natural
selection occurs, and is the main cause of new adaptions or
features in small organisms with short lifespans (bacteria, fruit
flies, etc.)

Hypothesis 3

Natural
selection occurs, and is the main cause of new adaptions or
features in large organisms such as humans.

You
do not prove Hypothesis 3 by merely proving Hypothesis 1 or
Hypothesis 2. Since the reproduction rate of tiny organisms may be
thousands or tens of thousands of times greater than the reproduction
rate of large organisms, you don't prove Hypothesis 3 by proving
Hypothesis 2. So you can't successfully rebut this post by merely
citing something that supports Hypothesis 1 or Hypothesis 2.

Given
all these problems with the idea of assuming that natural selection
is the main cause of evolution in large organisms, why is such an
idea being sold as “settled science”? Why are we being
dogmatically assured by so many biologists that they understand what
caused the appearance of man's higher traits? I think it's a
case of premature triumphalism. After first figuring out that
evolution is occurring, our biologists should have merely said to
themselves: we have completed one lap, but there are still 10,000
laps to go before we understand this. But instead scientists crowned
their heads with laurel leaves (and put gold medals around their
necks) after completing the first lap – by assuming that the first
major book on evolution had also figured out what the cause of it is.
It is all too plausible that the actual cause of evolution is some
principle or principles far more complex and vastly more deep than
the simple idea of natural selection. If we ever understand such a
principle or principles, I suspect we will find that it is also the
explanation of the origin of life, something entirely unexplained by
the theory of natural selection.

It
is entirely possible that the main thing driving evolution is some
natural mechanism far deeper and more sophisticated than natural
selection – some mechanism involving undiscovered laws of nature or
undiscovered information processes (or both) that tend to work in a
teleological or anti-chaotic manner, causing more and more complex
things to emerge from simpler things. Nature could have embedded
within it some kind of programming (or something that acts like
programming), some wellspring of emergence that acts as an antithesis
to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, causing ever-increasing order as
time passes. Such a principle might be behind the evolution of man's
faculties, the origin of life, and the physical ordering of the
universe since the time of the Big Bang.

Postscript: See the link here for a 2-sentence statement signed by hundreds of scientists and PhD's. The statement states exactly the following:

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

This
week I saw an outrageous example of puffery in a press release
announcing a scientific study. The press release was put out by the
Georgia Institute of Technology, and was picked up word-for-word by
the popular Science Daily site and other sites. The press
release was entitled “Finding the Origins of Life in a Drying
Puddle.”

Despite
the dramatic title suggesting a solution to the age-old problem of
the origin of life, when we read the details of the study we find
some utterly boring results that aren't even a major step towards
such a goal. Some scientists used a procedure involving wetting and
drying cycles, and succeeded in combining amino acids into
polypeptides that consisted of as many as 14 units.

To
illustrate how minor this result is, I need merely show a diagram of
a polypeptide. A polypeptide is like a necklace, and amino acids are
like beads on the necklace.

This
result (similar to previous results) is about as exciting as
stringing 14 necklace beads onto the string of a necklace, or
combining 13 individual playing cards into a bridge hand of 13
playing cards. The study does essentially nothing to answer the main
problems in the origin of life, which include the staggering problems
of the origin of self-replicating molecules, the origin of the
genetic code, and the origin of proteins consisting of thousands of
amino acids, not just 14.

So
what we have here is quite a case of exaggeration by biologists. A
press release that should have been humbly titled “Looking for the
Origins of Life in a Drying Puddle” has instead been titled
“Finding the Origins of Life in a Drying Puddle,” as if
scientists have already solved a problem that could easily take them
another thousand years to solve.

All
in all, this press release tends to raise again the question of
whether many of our scientists (who often speak as if they were lords
of knowledge) may be closer to being “lords of exaggeration.” The
truth is that scientists have made relatively little progress in the
past 70 years searching for clues to the origin of earthly life.
The task of explaining the origin of life using existing paradigms
seems all-but-insurmountable. The concepts of natural selection and
evolution really offer no help, because neither evolution nor natural
selection can get started until life itself begins.

As
I was typing this post, I was coincidentally watching a TV program in
which some astronomers talked about the likelihood of life on other
planets. One spoke as if the origin of life was as simple as having
the right ingredients. Using similar reasoning, we might vacuously
argue that we can explain the origin of a computer program by just
mentioning that the electrons that make up that program (when it is
stored in a computer) were lying around ready to be used.

The
problem of the origin of life is a problem of accounting for an
“information explosion” that seems inexplicable as a chance
event. To get insight on such a thing, we may need a new paradigm
that assumes that the information needed for the origin of life was
already lurking within the universe, in some mysterious information
infrastructure beyond our ken, some cosmic framework involving not
just laws of nature but programming. You can't dismiss such a
possibility by saying, “That's not allowed, because it sounds like
some gift of a deity interested in our existence.” Exactly the
same criticism could be made of the theory of gravitation or the
theory of electromagnetism, which are equally necessary for our
existence.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

When
people wish to exclude others from considering any possibility that
might be associated with the paranormal or the religious, such people
often use a type of reasoning I might call the “that's religion,
not science” argument. Most commonly this is used as a rationale
for completely excluding any thought that our universe may
be the result of something more than just blind chance. If someone,
for example, suggests that the origin of the universe may have been
some kind of divine creation, such a hypothesis may be excluded
under the grounds that such thinking is not science, but religion.

The
same reasoning can be used to try to justify a kind of “gag rule”
in scientific publications – a rule forbidding mention of anything
that might be considered from the world of the paranormal or the
religious. Got some evidence that suggests the possibility of some
design or purposeful direction in the origin of life or the evolution
of life? Sorry, discussing that is not allowed because that's
religion, not science. Got some evidence based on near-death
experiences that there might be such a thing as a soul that survives
death? Sorry, you can't discuss that in a scientific publication,
because that's religion not science. Got some evidence that there may
be some power of the mind beyond that which neurology can account
for? Sorry, you can't present that evidence because that's religion
not science. You get the idea. This “that's religion not science”
argument ends up being very convenient for the materialist or
physicalist, and it has a superficial plausibility.

This
type of reasoning involves a kind of “science and religion
apartheid” thinking. The idea is that there's the science box and
the religion box (like two cardboard boxes on different parts of the
floor), and that we have to place a particular idea or writing in
either one box or the other. Paraphrasing the famous statement about
East and West, you might express this assumption by stating this
slogan: science is science, and religion is religion, and never the
twain shall meet.

But
is this type of reasoning valid? No, it isn't, as I can show with an
important historical example. In the 1920's a Belgian priest by the
name of Georges Lemaître first
proposed the idea that the universe suddenly began ages ago in a
state of inconceivable density that he called a primordial atom. At
the time the idea that the universe had a sudden origin was an idea
from the world of religion, not the world of science. For one thing,
there was no known evidence for such a theory. Scientists favored a
different idea, that the universe had existed forever. No doubt many
scorned Lemaître's idea, saying “That's religion, not science.”
But in the next few decades the evidence for such a sudden beginning
of the universe began piling up. Now scientists accept such an idea,
which they call the Big Bang theory.

So
we have here an important example of an idea from the world of
religion – the idea of the sudden origin of the universe – that
started out as unsubstantiated (not science), but then actually
became science (and not just trivial science, but one of the most
important findings of modern science). What lesson must be draw from
this example? The lesson is: an idea should not at all be excluded
from further consideration by scientists merely on a basis such as
“that's religion, not science.” This example proves that an idea
that originally seems more religious than scientific may end up
becoming an important part of science.

So
the “that's religion, not science” type of reasoning is not valid
as some basis for exclusion. But why exactly is this reasoning
fallacious? I can give two reasons.

Reason
#1: There Are Several Definitions of Science

The
“that's religion, not science” type of reasoning takes advantage
of the fact that science is defined in two different ways that are
quite different. The first definition is what we may call the “facts
on the shelf” definition. People sometimes speak of science as the
body of facts collected by scientists. Using this definition, you
can attempt to categorize almost all theoretical ideas that
scientists discuss as being “not science,” on the grounds that
they are not yet proven facts. Just as you can exclude almost
everything from the world of the paranormal or the religious as “not
science,” you can exclude many scientific hot topics such as string
theory, the cosmic inflation theory, the multiverse, neo-Darwinism,
and many other theories which are not yet regarded as well-proven as,
say, the existence of gravitation or the existence of bacteria.

But there's a second definition of science
– what we can call the “process” definition. According to this
definition, science is the process of seeking truth through
systematic efforts that involve observations, experiments, and
theorizing. According to this definition, almost anything that
involves honest, systematic and well-organized observations,
experiments, or evidence-based theorizing is science (whether it be
professional science or what is called citizen science carried out by
non-professionals). So according to this definition, almost
everything that is typically excluded on the basis of being “religion
not science” is actually science. That doesn't mean that it's
proven to be entirely correct, but merely that it does fall under the
category of “the process of seeking truth through systematic
efforts that involve observations, experiments, and theorizing,”
which is one of the main definitions of science.

So,
in fact, it is not all clear that those items typically excluded as
being “religion, not science” are in reality “not science.”
They may well be science (either today or in the future) depending on
which definition of science you use.

Reason
#2: Ignoring the Possibility of an Overlap

The
second major fallacy in “that's religion, not science” type of
reasoning is the assumption that the realm of science truth claims
and the realm of religious truth claims are mutually exclusive areas
that can never overlap to any degree (so that once we have identified
something as a religious truth claim it can be excluded as a science
truth claim). The assumption may be illustrated by Model 1 in the diagram
below.

Such
an assumption may be incorrect, because there may be some overlap
between the realm of religious truth claims and the realm of science
truth claims. The truthful situation may be as illustrated as Model 2 in the
diagram above, in which some truth claims can exist in both the realm
of science and the realm of religion.

What
reasons are there for thinking that the correct model is the second
of these models, not the first? For one, there's the simple fact
that human realms of thought do not naturally tend to be entirely
mutually exclusive without any overlap. For example, there is a
political realm of thought that includes the notion that “all men
are created equal.” But the fact that a truth claim of human
equality has been made in the realm of politics does not mean that we
should exclude it from the realm of science. For example, if you were
doing a scientific study on intellectual abilities in different
races, it would hardly make sense to say, “I must at the beginning
rule out the idea that all races are equal, because the idea that all
men are equal belongs to politics, not science.”

Another
reason for thinking that the second diagram is the correct one is
that we have the huge historical example of the claim “the universe
suddenly originated.” That is a currently a claim existing in both
the realm of science and the realm of religion. So this proves there
is some overlap between the realm of science truth claims and the
realm of religious truth claims. We could easily add another
“overlap” example involving claims that the universe is
exquisitely fine-tuned. I could make a list of statements along these
lines by scientists and religious people, without identifying the
person who made the statement; and you would have a hard time
distinguishing between the statements by the religious and the
statements by the scientists. One might also add as examples of overlap between science and religion some of the items that Fritjof Capra called attention to in his famous book The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism.

What
is the proper attitude that a scientist should take to a truth claim
that he has identified as one that is being made by some religion or
religious person? The proper attitude is not one of automatic
exclusion because of such a thing, but instead an attitude of
indifference toward such a thing. For example, if you are a
scientist considering whether there is some evidence for the soul,
you should not be saying, “I will rule that out because some
religious people believe it,” but instead you should be saying, “I
will pay no attention to how many people believe it, but judge the
matter purely on the facts and the evidence.”

But
such a principle is ignored by many who try to keep science as
illogically exclusionary as a 1950's Alabama country club.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

In
his book Darwin's Doubt,
Stephen C. Meyer calls our attention to an unexplained anomaly in paleontology. When we examine the fossil record, we
don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even
rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years
ago. Instead, we see relatively little fossil evidence of life prior
to the Cambrian era about 500 million years ago. But during the
Cambrian era there is a sudden surge of fossils in the fossil record.
This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is
known as the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion is illustrated in the diagram below, from a paper suggesting a prosaic explanation for it. The "known fossil range" lines go back no further than the Cambrian era.

Meyer
(who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge) argues that this
Cambrian explosion is the result of intelligent design at work in the
evolution of life. But there is an alternative to assuming a
supernatural hand at work in such a thing. Maybe the Cambrian
explosion was caused by extraterrestrials.

We
can imagine a hypothetical conversation that could have occurred
millions of years ago, aboard an alien spaceship that entered into orbit
around our planet.

Xynus:
So give me the facts. What is the status of life on this planet?

Zeesin:
Our underwater robot probes have confirmed
that this planet is an evolutionary dud. There's hardly
anything here in the way of life. What a waste of time coming here to
this crummy little rock! I told you we should have checked out Alpha
Centauri instead.

Xynus:
But maybe we can turn this “dud” into a success. What if we were
to accelerate the evolution of life on this planet? Maybe we can turn
a dull planet into something where intelligence might eventually
evolve.

Zeesin:
What do you have in mind? Finding some of
those dismal organisms in this planet's oceans, and then
gene-splicing them to soup up their evolution? That would be a pretty
hard chore. You know I don't like to get my four feet wet.

Xynus:
No, I have something very different in mind. We can create some
species ourselves using our nanotechnology biology lab. We need
merely specify some requirements, and the computer will take care of
designing the appropriate DNA. We can print out the organisms cell
layer by cell layer using our molecular materializer. Then we just
dump the newly designed organisms into the oceans of thisplanet.

Zeesin:
Okay, I guess there's nothing much else to
do around here.

There
are three ages in time when the idea of extraterrestrial
intervention might be helpful. The first is the point when the most
primitive life developed. Modern science has not yet explained a
plausible scenario by which that occurred, partially because of the
difficulty of explaining both the origin of a self-replicating
molecule and the difficulty of explaining the origin of the genetic
code. The second age in time is the Cambrian explosion mentioned
here. The third age in time is the time when we saw the emergence of
human intelligence. We might call this the “consciousness
explosion,” when man seemed to gain in a relatively short span of
time (geologically speaking) a variety of subtle mental
characteristics such as aesthetic abilities, spirituality, math
abilities, language abilities, musical abilities, introspection, and
moral reasoning. Accounting for this consciousness explosion is
perhaps more difficult than accounting for the Cambrian explosion,
given that most of these things are not easy to explain through
natural selection, as they are mostly not traits that increase an organism's
likelihood of surviving until reproduction.

But
there is a barrier to anyone suggesting that some design – either
extraterrestrial or supernatural – may have played some role in the
origin of life or earthly life or human life. Some scientists have
declared that any mention of design in discussing such matters is
“not part of science” or “unscientific.” This thought taboo
is indefensible. A
few examples show very clearly that there is no truth to the idea
that “scientists don't consider the possibility of design” when
trying to consider causes.

For
example, imagine a strange radio signal is received from deep space.
If the signal is sufficiently suspicious, a scientist will indeed
consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the signal
may be a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Or imagine
that some suspicious looking structure (on an asteroid, moon, or
planet) is photographed by a space probe. A scientist will indeed
consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the
structure may have been designed by some extraterrestrial expedition
that arrived in our solar system. Or suppose a scientist finds some
artificial-looking object buried in a geological bed. A scientist
will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and
that the structure may have been designed by some human or some
extraterrestrial visitor. Any scientist could advance any of these
ideas in a scientific paper without fear of being excluded because he
had considered some possibility of design.

The
notion, therefore, that considering (or arguing for) a possibility of
design in discussing the origins of life on earth is unscientific (or
not admissible in a science publication) makes no sense. Such claims
need to be translated. When a scientist claims that a hypothesis is
“not part of science,” what he typically means is that such a
hypothesis “is forbidden or should be forbidden to scientists.”
When he claims that a particular hypothesis is unscientific, what he
typically means is that such a hypothesis is a taboo that violates
the tribal norms of the scientific community. Such claims tell us
about sociological and cultural restrictions and prohibitions within the scientific
community, but usually don't give us any cogent principle as to how
our thought should be limited.

Friday, July 10, 2015

In
my previous postWhen Rhine and Pearce Got Smoking Gun Evidence
for ESP, I discussed a series of tests that provide very good
evidence for ESP (extrasensory perception). In 2013 this evidence and
other evidence for ESP was attacked in a book by Brian Clegg entitled
Extra Sensory. Although Clegg claims in the last paragraph of
this book that he was examining the topic of ESP “with an open
mind,” his complete hostility toward the topic is made clear
throughout his very jaundiced book, which is very much a one-sided
tract. Let's take a look at Clegg's attack, and see whether it has
any weight.

First,
let me describe the experiments with Hubert E. Pearce Jr., which were
performed at the prestigious Duke University during the 1930's, under
the supervision of Professor Joseph Rhine. The main series of tests
were tests not of telepathy (also known as mind-reading), but tests
of clairvoyance, an ability of a single mind to obtain information
through non-sensory means. Both telepathy and clairvoyance fall under
the category of ESP or extrasensory perception, since they would seem
to involve some kind of anomalous perception that does not involve
the senses.

The
clairvoyance tests done with Pearce (described here) were simple. Two people
would sit at a table, the person being tested, and an observer.
Twelve decks of cards were put on the table, cards known as Zener
cards, that can have one of 5 different symbols on one side (with all
the cards having the same appearance on the opposite side).

Zener cards used in ESP testing

The
person being tested would shuffle the cards, and the observer would
then cut the cards, assuring that the top cards were random. The
person being tested would then hold a series of cards (either 5 or
25) one by one, face down, and guess which of the five symbols was on
the unseen side of the card. After the series was done there would
then be a stack of either 5 or 25 cards which had been the target of
guesses. Those cards would then be turned face up one by one. As each
card was turned face up, the observer would record whether the
previous guess about that card's symbol was correct or not correct.

With
a variety of observers and with a variety of testing conditions (some
of which would have absolutely precluded the possibility of
cheating), Hubert Pearce got astonishing results too good to be
explained by chance. Below is the result of these tests. These are tests in which the expected chance result (average per 25) is only 5.

Pearce
got 3746 correct guesses out of 10,300. We can use the very handy
binomial probability calculator at this
site to calculate the likelihood of these results. The calculator
gives a probability of simply 0 when we type in the overall results,
so let's use a subset to try to get some non-zero result. Let's use
only rows 2 and 6, involving either Pearce looking away from the
cards or a screen between Pearce and the cards, either one of which
should have ruled out any possibility of cheating. When I type these
results in the binomial probability calculator, I get a result with a
chance probability of 5 chances in 100 trillion, which we can round
to be 1 chance in 10 trillion. This is a result we should never
expect to get by pure chance even if we tested with every single
person in the human race.

Now
what does Clegg say to try to discredit this very convincing evidence
for ESP? For one thing, he suggests that Pearce may have got his
result by looking at cards seen in someone's glasses. This is a
completely illegitimate explanation for any of the results involving
Pearce. None of the results (neither the results discussed above, nor
the equally dramatic Pearce-Pratt experiment described below)
involved one person holding cards while looking at them while someone
nearby tried to guess the cards.

Pearce
was never trained in magic, and was never caught cheating during any
of the long series of tests he was involved which, which dragged on for
months. But this does not stop Clegg from offering the suggestion
that Pearce's incredible results were the result of cheating by him.
Clegg states, “I can think of three or four ways to do this, the
most obvious being to sneak a peek at an upcoming card when the
observer was concentrating on recording the previous guess.”

Clegg's
absurd reasoning here is wholly without merit. If one person is
sitting directly across a table from another person, and the second
person is taking a second to write down which of five guesses was
made (which almost certainly would take no more than a few seconds, since
it can be done by a one-letter notation), the first person would have
a very high chance of being detected any particular time that he
tried to peek at the top value of a card deck lying on the table.
This is because humans have peripheral vision. If you are writing a
one-letter jot on a piece of paper on a table, you can certainly see
in the “corner of your eye” with your peripheral vision someone
reaching out his hand to peek at the top card in a deck. I may also note that the
type of cards used here (Zener cards) don't even have an indication
of their value on their corner (unlike playing cards). So you can't
peek at the value of a Zener card just by turning its corner – you
have to flip the card over or half-turn the card.

But
in order for Pearce to have got the results that Rhine recorded, he
would have had to peek at the value of the cards hundreds of
times without ever being detected once by an observer sitting right
across from him (and have this happen with a number of different
observers). Under such conditions there is no chance that someone
would be able to successfully peek at the top value more than about
10 times without being detected, and it is very likely that the first
such attempt would be detected.

Another
reason why Clegg's reasoning is completely without substance is that
the table above shows that Pearce got extremely compelling results
even in 3 series in which there was zero chance of peeking, one in
which he was forced to look away from the observer, and two others in
which there was a screen between the cards and Pearce's face. In the
two “looking away” series (series 2 and 3 above) he got a total 515 successes out of 1125 (a result which there is basically zero chance of you getting by mere chance). In the two “screen between the cards and the card
guesser” tests the results were 215 correct guesses out of 600,
which has a probability of less than 1 in 10 trillion (1 in
10,000,000,000,000) according to the binomial calculator I just linked to.

Clegg
also suggests (without any evidence) that Pearce may have somehow made markings on the cards
allowing him to cheat. This extremely implausible suggestion is also without merit, as
Rhine's original account of the tests states, “We brought in new
cards many times, without there resulting any change in the level of
scoring.” The fact that 12 decks of cards were on the table for the
tests also means that card markings cannot explain the results. Clegg
also suggests that Pearce “had the opportunity to take a quick look
at the whole pack while not being observed.” This suggestion is
also without merit because the protocol involved cards that were
shuffled and cut before anyone guessed about their value.

Having
discussed the Pearce-Rhine clairvoyance tests, and having offered no
objections with any substance, Clegg goes on to discuss the equally
compelling Pratt-Pearce tests on telepathy. The format for these
tests was very different. A person called the observer (Professor
Pratt) shuffled a deck of Zener cards, and at particular intervals
would turn the top card and record its value. The person being tested
(Pearce) was in distant location 100 yards away or even farther
away. The person being tested had instructions to begin guessing
which card had been turned, beginning at a particular time known to
both the observer and the person being tested. After a particular
length of time had passed, both the observer and the person being
tested would hand in their written results to a third person, who
would check and see how many of the guesses were accurate.

The tests (described here) were run from August 1933 to March 1934, totaling 74 runs
through a pack of 25 cards. The rate of card guessing was 1 per
minute. The total amount of time that Pearce spent guessing cards was
about 30 hours. 1850
cards were dealt, and the expected chance success rate was about 370
cards. Instead, Pearce got 558 correct guesses.

The
results of the test are shown below. The final column P shows the
probability of getting these result by chance, which was about 1 in
1022 or 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

To
try to debunk this result, Clegg suggests the idea that Pearce
secretly sneaked over to Pratt's office, and then peeked over a crack
at the top of the door. He restates an old idea that Pearce may have
peeked through a transom at the top of Pratt's office. This
suggestion is not at all credible for several reasons. For one thing,
there's a 99% likelihood that no one would ever attempt so risky a
procedure. Then there's the 99% likelihood that if someone did
attempt such a procedure, he would have been detected by Pratt (or by
Rhine, who joined Pratt for one of the series). If you are close
enough to see the values of cards being turned by peeking through a
transom, you are close enough to be heard or seen by the person
turning those cards (partially because standing on a chair for long
periods inevitably results in chair squeaks that can be heard). Then
there's the fact that if you were to spend hours peeking through a
transom at the top of a door (which would require standing on a
chair), there's a 99.9% likelihood that you would be detected by some
passerby, who would either report this suspicious behavior to the
professor, or ask aloud “why are you peeking through that transom,”
which would give you away (the halls of universities tend to have
lots of foot traffic at all hours of the day). So this transom
objection is not a reasonable reason for rejecting the Pearce-Pratt
result as being convincing evidence for ESP.

The
dismal failure of Clegg's debunking efforts can be shown as follows:
suppose we accept both this enormously implausible “transom
peeking” idea and also the infinitely more implausible idea of
hundreds of card deck peeks going unnoticed by an observer directly
across the table (which is rather like assuming that someone can
really jump to the moon). Then you still have not explained
away the evidence for ESP involving tests with Pearce – for even
then you still have no explanations for the extremely compelling
evidence produced when there was a screen between the card guesser
and the cards (series 6 listed in the first table) – tests in which
there were 215 correct guesses out of 600, which has a probability of
less than 1 in 10 trillion (1 in 10,000,000,000,000).

The
evidence discussed here involving Hubert Pearce is only one piece of
a great mountain of evidence showing the reality of ESP. Another
very important piece is the ganzfeld studies done in recent decades.
Repeated many times by many experimenters, these studies have
consistently shown that subjects undergoing sensory deprivation are
able to score at a rate of between 30% and 32% on tests in which the
chance result should only be 25%. This is overwhelming evidence for
ESP.

Clegg
is not able to debunk this evidence. His approach is basically to
look for anything at all which he regards as a discrepancy between
the way he would ideally do such a test, and the way the test was done, and to call that an error. The same type of reasoning might
lead someone to say that your SAT score is not reliable because there
was the “error” that there were not steel walls between yourself
and the test takers to your right and left.

Clegg
concentrates on mentioning issues with the early versions of the
ganzfeld experients. But the designers of these experiments closely
worked with skeptics, and came up with a joint statement agreeing on
protocols that should be followed henceforward to assure the
reliability of these experiments. Even after these tightened-up
protocols were put in place, the experiments continued to get results
showing dramatic evidence of ESP, with the subjects achieving
success rates between 30% and 32% far in excess of the 25% success
rate they should be getting if ESP does not exist. As wikipedia.com
reports, “In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di
Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498
trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%.”
That is a rate far above the expected chance rate of 25%. See the pdf here for a meta analysis reporting the 30% number.

Contrary
to the impression Clegg tries to create in his 2013 book (with some
blatant cherry-picking that omits results after the year 2000), the
spectacular success of the ganzfeld experiments have continued even
after the procedures had their protocols tightened-up. These recent
tests between 1997 and 2014 provide very good evidence for ESP, as
the likelihood of you getting these results by chance is much less
than 1 in a trillion. Why is it that Clegg takes five pages to
discuss the ganzfeld experiments, without taking a sentence to state
the results they got (a sentence like this: the chance expectation
was 25%, but the results were between 30 and 32%)? It's kind of like
someone arguing that Ty Cobb was a poor hitter, and conveniently
failing to mention Cobb's batting average.

The
evidence for ESP is overwhelming, and continues to accumulate. This
evidence holds up very well to Clegg's unsound assault, which
consists mainly of the noise of blank shells firing. Besides abundant
anecdotal evidence that frequently crops up in human experience (such
as when we think of someone who rarely calls on the phone, just
before he calls on the phone), there is over 100 years of compelling
published scientific evidence, involving a very large number of
subjects. At last year's conference of the Parapsychological Association, Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell presented a paper describing a
test with an autistic child, a subject producing results as
spectacular as those produced by Pearce in the 1930's. As discussed here, she showed a
long tape of an experiment with this subject at the conference, one
demonstrating spectacular results. As discussed here, she is currently working on a more
polished film that will present these results to the general public. A preliminary video of previous experiments with this autistic child can be seen here.

Monday, July 6, 2015

There is an intellectual
sin that is very common among many modern scientists: the sin of
speaking as if they had explanations that account for long-standing
puzzles of nature, even if they don't really have such
explanations, but at best merely have small fragments of such
explanations. Imagine a person who doesn't have a blanket, but merely
has some threads picked up from various places on the floor. Such a
person might try to call those threads a blanket, or most of a
blanket, but that would be quite an exaggeration. Similar to such a
person, many a modern scientist speaks as if he is some great
knowledge lord who has mastered some deep puzzle of nature, when he
is merely someone familiar with a few things that might be fragments of the solution of such a puzzle (like individual pieces of
a 50-meter-long jigsaw puzzle).

I read an example of this
type of exaggeration today in a post by cosmologist Ethan Siegel.
Siegel makes this claim: “The inflationary Big Bang Universe, with
radiation, normal matter, dark matter and dark energy, explains the
full suite of absolutely everything we’ve ever observed, and
nothing else does.” Is this statement true? No, it's a ridiculous
case of overselling a very patchy theoretical framework.

First, the
inflationary Big Bang universe theory does not explain the origin of
the universe itself, leaving it as a complete mystery. Second, there are many important physical things unexplained by the inflationary Big Bang theory -- things such as the hierarchical structure of the universe, the CMB cold spot, the persistence of spiral galaxies, and the fine tuning of fundamental constants that makes possible a habitable universe. Third, we
have no real understanding of either dark energy or dark matter. Neither
is part of the Standard Model of Physics. The very terms “dark matter”
and “dark energy” are pretty much just euphemisms for “some kind
of mysterious something that we know nothing about.” So claiming
that explains something (or is part of an explanation) is erroneous.

When physicists and
cosmologists actually do calculations relevant to the issue of dark
energy, they get a shocking result: that the vacuum of space should
be filled with a dark energy or cosmological constant more than a
billion trillion quadrillion times (more than
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times) larger than
we observe. This is the completely unsolved “cosmological constant”
problem (sometimes called the vacuum catastrophe) that has long
haunted physics and cosmology (it is discussed here). Claiming that dark energy is part
of some explanation of “absolutely everything we've ever observed”
is hilarious. Better to say that dark energy is part of the reason
we can't even explain the simplest thing we can think of (the
vacuum) – because according to physicist's calculations the vacuum
should be so packed with dark energy that it should have more
mass-energy than solid steel.

There are other fields of
inquiry in which scientists claim to understand puzzles of nature
they do not understand, by trying to exaggerate what they have
learned. One such field is the field of biology. Here the most
prominent cases of explanatory exaggeration involve
evolution and natural selection. We commonly hear scientists speak as
if evolution is some magic potion that explains
“in one fell swoop” how it is that there came to be beings such
as us on this planet.

But it isn't. While
evolution and natural selection are very probably important pieces in
the puzzle of the origin of intelligent life on our planet, they are
probably no more than pieces in that jigsaw puzzle. For one thing, neither
evolution nor natural selection can explain either the origin of life
or the origin of the genetic code. That's because both evolution and
natural selection require life itself, and you can't explain the origin of life by
something that requires life.

Moreover, humans have
many special mental and spiritual capabilities that are extremely
difficult or impossible to explain by natural selection or evolution.
Humans have inner selves and personalities. Humans are great at
language, and at formulating very abstract ideas. Humans are capable
of wonder, joy, love, guilt, compassion, imagination, and
spirituality. Humans can create art and literature, ponder their own
deaths, wonder about the meaning of life and the nature of the
universe, create and follow moral codes, and consider philosophical
matters. As argued here, it is hard to explain most of these things by evoking evolution or
natural selection, because most of them have no survival value, from an
evolutionary standpoint of making an organism more likely to survive
until it reproduces.

Things evolution has a hard time explaining

How did humanity get these
things? We don't know. The modern biologist offers an unconvincing,
simplistic explanation – “it all just came from evolution.” But
the actual explanation is probably far deeper and more complex. I can
understand why the biologist would wish to offer this answer of “it all just came from evolution.” It is always better to be able
to say, “I have the answer to this great mystery of nature,” than
to say, “I have but a few tiny fragments that may one day be of use
in solving this great puzzle.” It is always more pleasing to put
yourself on a pedestal marked “Great Lord of Knowledge” than to
humbly realize that the puzzles of nature vastly exceed your meager
understanding.

If you point out the explanatory limits of evolution to a biologist, you may be attacked as an evolution denier, even if you did not at all deny it, but merely pointed out its explanatory limits.

Another example of
inflated knowledge pretensions involve claims about the human brain.
Scientists have done some brain imaging studies showing how parts of
the brain light up differently under different conditions. If you
read some enthusiastic reports of such studies, you might get the
idea that scientists have a deep understanding of how our brains
work. But they don't.

As the book Mind and
Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience makes
clear, brain imaging studies have cast relatively little light on the
mysterious workings of the brain. Here are some points made on page
365-366 of the book:

Brain imaging
meta-studies show that when the results of a number of experiments
are pooled, the typical result is to show activations over most of
the brain, rather than convergence on a single location...
Considerable portions of modern cognitive neuroscience's empirical
research support the idea that every cognitive process is a product
of the action of a highly integrated system in which many parts of
the brain interact rather than function independently as isolated
regions...There has been little replication of most findings...No
part of the brain has only a single, unique function...Clinical data,
especially with traumatic injuries, do not display high degrees of
correlation between particular brain lesions and cognitive states.

It
would seem that those who claim to understand the brain through some
kind of “this part does this thing” approach are exaggerating
their understanding, and that the brain is still a deep, intractable
mystery. Indeed, there is every reason to suspect that we are
centuries away from being able to understand the brain's secrets.

How is it that these
examples of knowledge hubris become so widely accepted? How is it
that again and again our scientists get people to think that they are
knocking on a door marked “Final Explanation” when they have
often just walked a few paces down the long, long road that leads to
that door? Part of the reason is that it's like a school where there
are no teachers to give scientists grades, and they can make their
own grades. Imagine if you were at a school without any teachers,
one in which you give yourself a grade. You might learn just a few
facts about modern history (such as the fact that soldiers landed on
a beach on June 6, 1944, and the fact that some bombs were dropped on
December 7, 1941). You might then conclude that because you had
learned these things, you now had a deep understanding of modern
history, and give yourself an “A” in the Modern History course.
There would be no one around to say, “no, no, you have learned just
the tiniest fraction of what you need to know to understand that
topic.” Similarly, there is no one around to correct the scientist
who fancies himself a knowledge lord after learning but a few paltry
fragments of nature's vast and deep secrets.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

The theory of homeopathy is not one
that I profess belief in, and at this time I do not recommend making
crucial medical decisions based on it. But I do think it is an
interesting hypothesis that might be worthy of further study. A
better name for the theory might be to call it a hypothesis of
anomalous aqueous traces. The idea behind homeopathy is that if you
take water and put certain chemicals or medicines in it, and then
dilute the water repeatedly, until no recognizable trace of the
original ingredient is left, then somehow the water retains some
beneficial effect from these earlier ingredients – almost as if the
water somehow “remembered” what was previously in it.

To a materialist scientist, such an
idea is a pure abomination. But it could just possibly be that such
an effect occurs, if there are mysterious unknowns involving water
that we are ignorant of. Water is a most astonishing substance which
is a great example of unpredictable emergence. There are many unusual
properties of water (some of them vital for our existence) that are
not at all predictable from merely considering the things that
water is composed of (two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom).
Considering that fact, it does not seem so implausible that water
might have some unknown abilities which we are ignorant of, including
just possibly some ability to store traces of previous ingredients in
some anomalous way.

There actually seems to be evidence
suggesting that inanimate objects may be able to somehow hold
anomalous traces of information. Such evidence falls under the
category of what parapsychologists call psychometry. Psychometry
allegedly involves a mysterious ability to hold some old object, and tell
information about facts associated with that object, such as
incidents it was involved with, or previous people who owned it. The
idea seems outrageous, but significant evidence has been gathered to
suggest such a thing may actually occur. For example, anthropologist
David E. Jones was able to find four people who did surprisingly well
when asked to provide information relevant to artifacts and fossils
that they were asked to touch. In one case, three subjects were given
nondescript rocks gathered from a Mayan site, and the subjects were
able to describe a site and culture like those where the rocks were
taken from.

The idea of anomalous invisible traces
may not seem so outrageous if one considers an interesting scene from
a famous movie. In the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by
Northwest, there is a scene where Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant
are in a hotel room. Talking on the phone, Eva writes down a number
on a notepad, rips off the top sheet of the notepad, and departs.
Cary needs to get that number, but it now seems impossible to do so.
But it is actually possible – because of an invisible trace of the
phone number. Cary takes the notepad Eva used, and fills the top page
with pencil scratches. Holding that top page to a light, he sees a
previously invisible trace of the phone number. It is not unthinkable
that nature may have hidden within it something equivalent to that
page – something that stores information on previous states of
material objects. If such a thing exists (as psychometry evidence
suggests), then a hypothesis such as homeopathy may not be so
unthinkable.

But such possibilities cannot be
conceded by the critics of homeopathy. One of these critics has
recently escalated his loathing for homeopathy into a shocking new
level. He has flatly stated that all those who believe in homeopathy
are mentally ill. This statement was made in a recent post entitled
“Homeopsychopaths.” The post was approvingly published on two
web sites run by scientists, the "Science 2.0" site at Science20.com and the site
RealClearScience.com.

It must be noted that this type of
deplorable hate-mongering may be a serious warning sign. During the
1930's people in Germany began publishing inflammatory claims about
Jews. The next step a few years later was to start smashing the
windows of Jewish stores, and the next step after that was to lock up
the Jews in concentration camps.

When an authority tries to punish
deviant thought by claiming that all who hold such opinions are
mentally ill, it almost makes me wonder whether there is any chance that
this is a first step in a path that may eventually lead to enforced
confinement of those who hold views that deviate from materialist
orthodoxy. Think that such a scenario could never happen? It did
happen in the Soviet Union. For many years one of the many “symptoms”
that could cause you to be confined to a Soviet psychiatric center
was the supposed “mental illness” of holding anti-materialist
views.

Let's hope that if this happens in
America, it never gets as bad as suggested by the following sign,
which depicts a “psychiatric hospital” decades in the future.

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.